Kings succeeding despite punchless power play

NHL playoffs 2012: L.A. Kings succeeding in spite of punchless power play

EL SEGUNDO, Calif. — A year ago, the Vancouver Canucks lost the Stanley Cup final primarily, in their own minds, because they could not make the Boston Bruins pay for crimes of aggression by scoring on them with the man (or men) advantage.

Two-for-33, remember?

The Bruins, meanwhile, won it all despite having the worst playoff power play success rate, 11.4 per cent, of any Stanley Cup champion in history.

Cut to Sunday at the Los Angeles Kings’ practice facility … or rather, the L.A. Lakers’ training gym, which adjoins the Kings’ digs at the Toyota Sports Center and which has been turned into a hockey media centre and interview room now that the Cup final has moved westward.

The Kings, surrounded here by the evidence of the Lakers’ sustained excellence — five NBA titles when they were still based in Minneapolis, 10 more L.A. championship banners arrayed around the gym walls — have never won a Stanley Cup but they are two victories away from doing so, potentially with as few as two losses along the trail, in spite of a power play so dismal it makes last year’s Bruins units look practically competent.

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“It’d be nice to put a banner up in our place,” mused the Kings’ young franchise defenceman, Drew Doughty.

L.A.’s power play is limping along at 7.8 per cent efficiency, compared to the No. 1 playoff power play of the Philadelphia Flyers (35.7 per cent) … whom the Devils beat in the second round with a power play that’s less than half as productive.

So, you may ask, how important is it really?

Were the Canucks’ power play failures not the real story against the Bruins, merely a convenient mask of their other issues? Can a really hot team, with excellent goaltending and penalty killing, make its own power play successes or failures nearly irrelevant?

“I think it’s one of those things you should stay focused on,” Kings captain Dustin Brown said Sunday. ”Our (final) percentage is not going to be good regardless, but we have opportunities ahead of us on the power play. This whole season, we haven’t scored many (power play) goals. But the goals we have scored have been really key goals for us, dating to the very first series against Vancouver.”

The Kings scored three power play goals in the first two games against the Canucks, but they’re just 3-for-65 since.

“Sometimes the power play, you look at the percentages, it’s struggling. The flipside of that is, five of them are big goals,” said Brown.

The fact is, though, the Kings have scored just six goals on 77 power-play chances, only one more goal than they’ve scored shorthanded.

And the players on the L.A. power play units, despite the encouraging noises head coach Darryl Sutter keeps making, are individually and collectively ticked off at their lack of success.

Doughty, whose highlight-reel, end-to-end goal in the first period of Game 2 Saturday night stood up until Ryan Carter tied it up for the Devils early in the third, pointed to the power play the Kings got with 3:05 left in the game. But L.A. didn’t make anything happen, and eventually turned the puck over and Doughty had to hook Travis Zajac to prevent a shorthanded breakaway.

“If we score there, we put them away,” he said.

The inability to score hasn’t come back to bite them yet, and maybe, judging by last season’s final, it won’t.

“It hasn’t been (a factor), but we can make it a factor if we score,” Doughty said. “It’s a huge difference in the game.”

The reasons for power plays struggling more the later it goes in the playoffs are fairly obvious.

“I think, first off, just because of the technology, (power plays are) pre-scouted right down to the inch,” said Sutter. “I think penalty killing becomes such a premium because it is part of the defense. Usually finals and playoffs are lower scoring. There’s not much secret in it ever. Even if you do anything different, you’ve got to practice it … and practices are open now (to the opposition coaches).”

“Everybody is working so hard not to get scored on in the playoffs,” said Kings’ Dustin Penner. “I don’t know a power play out there that’s clicking in the playoffs the way it did in the regular season. Fifteen percent in the playoffs seems about right to me. Every PK we’ve come across has been a mirror image of our own, where the work is there, the system is there, and they’re snuffing out any opportunity the power play may have.”

Then, too, there is the quality of the ice in May and June.

“There were times in that first game when you could only see half the puck,” said Sutter, of the sweltering conditions in New Jersey on Wednesday. “It was like growing up playing outside when you’d shoot it into the snow and have to go looking for the puck that had your initials on it.”

The Devils’ power play, though only half as ineffective as the Kings’, has been no great shakes, either. Ilya Kovalchuk called it an embarrassment after Game 2, which head coach Pete DeBoer said Sunday might be “a little harsh.

“Hopefully a little is lost in translation there,” said the coach, whose team had to board its first plane in five weeks to get here.

“You’re emotional after a loss. We did a lot of good things. I really liked our game. I thought we were 50 per cent better than the first one and I still think we have more in the tank.”

It’s a daunting task they face, though. Of the last six teams to open a Stanley Cup final with two road wins, five have gone on to sweep the series, and the only one that didn’t, the 1990 Edmonton Oilers, beat Boston in five.

So just winning a game, at this point, is a challenge for the Devils, though DeBoer took issue with that perception, especially when someone suggested that his team had been dominated so far.

“Who said we were dominated, and what were they drinking?” DeBoer said, smiling. “Must have been somebody from here. You’ve got two 2-1 overtime games. We could be in a different situation — we’re not — but we know we can play with them, and we feel we have another level to go to here.

“We feel we have to win one game to put a completely different spin on this series.”